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I’m cracking the future of food – no chickens required

Egg-free mayonnaise is just the first in a line of eco-friendly products from Josh Tetrick's company, Hampton Creek. But what is the secret ingredient?

By Niall Firth

“We think you change the world by making the good things so obscenely better it’s foolish not to do it”

(Image: Colby Macri)

You’re creating egg-free versions of popular foods such as mayonnaise. Why?The vast majority of food we buy today is surprisingly cheap and tastes pretty good but is bad for our bodies and destructive for the planet. Most people aren’t choosing that because they’re uncaring. We think they’re choosing it because it’s easy. Our vision is something different.

What’s bad about using eggs in mayonnaise?It’s radically inefficient. Growing soya and corn to feed chickens, in particular, requires an enormous amount of land, water and energy.

How do you get people to eat egg-free mayo?Our theory is you don’t convince people to do the right thing. We think you change the world by making the good things so obscenely better it’s foolish not to do it. We don’t think people are going to eat our mayonnaise because it doesn’t have eggs in it. People are going to eat it because it tastes better, lasts longer and is more affordable. It only works if you win on the merits. How do you find a plant that can take the place of egg?

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I started this knowing nothing about the world of biochemistry or food science. We brought in some biochemists and they ran tests, looking at the molecular weight of plant proteins, the solubility, all sorts of different properties. We identified one plant, a cultivar of the Canadian yellow pea, that’s a particularly good element in a mayo system.

With so many plants, where do you start?There are a few filters that we have. We like to look at species that are already called GRAS species, which stands for generally regarded as safe, at least according to the US Food and Drug Administration. We prefer plants that don’t require a lot of water for two reasons&colon; it’s expensive and the world is facing a water shortage. We don’t like plants that use a lot of land because that’s an issue. And we don’t want a plant with a funny name. If it sounds funny my grandma is not going to buy the mayonnaise at Walmart. We can’t change the name of the plant.

And now you’ve got data experts involved. What are they doing?We can’t manually screen 400,000 plants. You need a more data-driven approach. Every species has lots of subtypes. In each of the cultivars, we’re looking at different properties of the protein. There are lots of variables. And then we’re trying to connect those data points with functions like&colon; does it emulsify, does it aerate, does it gel in a pan, does it actually taste good when it crunches in your mouth? The data scientists can make intelligent connections using all that data.

What are you looking for next?We like the idea of creating a fundamentally better pasta, one that uses a lot less water and land and is better from an animal welfare perspective. And then we’ve identified a plant that scrambles like a chicken egg and that is going to be released fairly soon too.

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Josh Tetrick founded Hampton Creek, a San Francisco start-up that uses plants to replace eggs in food products. His egg-free mayonnaise Just Mayo hits Tesco supermarkets this month

This article appeared in print under the headline “No chickens required”